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<div style="text-align: center; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">=========================================================================<br>L O W L A N D S - L - 14 July 2008 - Volume 04<br style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">
<span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">-------------------------------------------------------------------------</span><br style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">Please set the encoding mode to Unicode (UTF-8).</span><br style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">
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<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="HcCDpe"><span class="EP8xU" style="color: rgb(91, 16, 148);">Sandy Fleming</span> <span class="lDACoc"><<a href="mailto:sandy@scotstext.org">sandy@scotstext.org</a>></span></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Subject: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="HcCDpe">LL-L "Grammar" 2008.07.13 (04) [E]<br><br></span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">> From: R. F. Hahn <</span><a style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com">sassisch@yahoo.com</a><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> Subject: Grammar</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> to a range of families. Among the Sino-Tibetan languages, for example,</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> take the Chinese ones...</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> * Gender: none</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> * Plural: only in three personal pronouns</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> * Verb tense: none, except one particle expressing change and</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> another expressing progress</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> * Word inflection: none</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> As in the case of English, sentence structure is rigid because it</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> plays an important grammatical role.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
Um... good point. Would it be possible to invent a grammar-sparse</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
language which still allowed a flexible sentence order, I wonder? Are</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
there any natural languages like that?</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
I suppose it could be that the two principles conflict logically.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<font style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" color="#888888"><br>
Sandy Fleming<br>
<a href="http://scotstext.org/" target="_blank">http://scotstext.org/</a><br><br>----------<br><br></font><font style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" size="2"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">From: R. F. Hahn <<a href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com" target="_blank">sassisch@yahoo.com</a>>
<br>
Subject: Lexicon<br><br>Sandy:<br><br></span></font><div style="margin-left: 40px; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">
Um... good point. Would it be possible to invent a grammar-sparse</span><br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">
language which still allowed a flexible sentence order, I wonder? Are</span><br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">
there any natural languages like that?</span><br></div><font style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" size="2"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><br>I have never come across any, and I doubt there are any.</span></font><font style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" size="2"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> At the very least, you need to distinguish subject from object, or else you don't know who does what to whom.</span></font><font style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" size="2"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> And you also need to distinguish indirect objects from direct objects in many cases. Lack of morphological marking must be compensated for by syntactic marking, i.e., syntactic slots serving as markers. I don't know what other sort of device you'd use, except perhaps intonation, and I guess that would be a type of morphological marking if it existed.<br>
<br>Old English syntax is a lot more flexible than is Modern English syntax, simply because the morphology came to be simplified so much. Although not to quite the same extent, it applies to Old Norse and Icelandic versus Modern Scandinavian, for instance, also to Old Frisian versus Modern Frisian, Old Low Franconian versus Modern Dutch and Afrikaans, and Old Saxon versus Low Saxon. Among the Germanic languages, it seems to be only Icelandic, Faroese and German that preserved most of its morphology and thus syntactic flexibility, Yiddish probably a little less.<br>
<br>Regards, <br>Reinhard/Ron</span></font><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
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